Lesson 0: The Set-Up #

The name of this lesson is taken from the beginning of the movie The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Lesson summary #

At the end of this lesson you should be able to:

• Run all the necessary tools for building and running a real datastar project.
• Run your enable script to set up your environment and tooling.

You should also know:

• The basic purpose of the tools that we are going to be using to build this application, even if you don’t know them in detail.
• The purpose and theory of the enable script and, if you are an advanced user, why you don’t want to use it.
• Whether or not you should be reading this book–we hope you will be!
• How to understand the formatting convention that we use in this book, “is that a file showing a shell script or a shell script that I should enter?”
• What resources you can consult if your project (or our documentation!) gets seriously hosed.